Friday, June 27, 2008

Timetoast is a new web application for the creation and sharing of timelines. Timetoast lets you create multiple timelines using your own images. Your timelines can be embedded in any blog, wiki, or web page.Adding events to your timeline is point-and-click easy. You have the option to include more detail about each event that is displayed when the event title is clicked. You can also include an image with each event. The interface is very clean and attractive. And, best of all, it's totally free.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

This AP article by Felicia Fonseca describes how a small New Mexico high school equipped all of its students with Microsoft Zunes and began to use podcasting.

The students were encouraged to be linked to their devices during class hours, on bus rides home and on school trips. Teachers got a $400 bonus for coming up with lessons to identify 20 downloadable digital lectures that supported their lessons and to develop five of their own.

Monday, June 16, 2008

This assault on the lowly -- and mighty -- sentence, he (Librarian of CongressJames Billington) says, is symptomatic of a disease potentially fatal to civilization. If the sentence croaks, so will critical thought. The chronicling of history. Storytelling itself.

Monday, June 9, 2008

For the last several days I've been checking out a new social micro-blogging site, Plurk.com. Actually, I'm way past "checking it out," I'm nearing "consumed by" status. I had tried Twitter twice in the past and it just didn't work for me. But Plurk has grabbed me by the *****!

The community is still small but vibrant and enthusiastic, and growing. I think that they, like myself, are excited about being in at the start of something with potentially a great future. Plurkers appear to be a more mature, more sophisticated group. As yet, not a lot of kids appear to be plurkers. I have met a lot of really interesting, wonderful plurkers so far and had a blast!

The quirk of Plurk is the horizontal timeline.Newest items appear at the left and by dragging or using the scroll wheel you can go back in time. It has a bit of a learning curve, but as I got more familiar with it, navigation became relatively simple.

I really like the conversational threads that develop from individual posts and appear in a drop-down window. Sometimes these convos go on for hours with various plurkers jumping in and out as they can.

You can also preface your plurk with a choice of verbs and choose from an assortment of emoticons.

There's a system of karma points with certain plateaus that open new features. For example, when you reach 25 karma points, you're emoticon set increases.

You can group friends into cliques and send private plurks among the members of that group.

Sunday, June 8, 2008

Thanks for responding to my survey about how you use technology. Twenty-five of you responded. Here is a summary of the results.

Eighty percent of you use email often when you are not in school, and nearly half of you have two personal email accounts that you use regularly. More than half of you use web-based email which is a really good thing for security purposes.

Forty percent of you have two or more computers at home. Desktop systems dominate (56%) but 28% have both desktop and notebook machines. By far, the vast majority run Windows XP (92%). Two people use the Mac OS. (Who's my buddy?)Internet Explorer is overwhelmingly the most used browser, but I'm glad to see almost 1/3 of you using Firefox, which is better than Firefox's current 20% market share. Unfortunately, about a quarter say they are using dial-up to access the internet.Four out of five of you shop the internet at least occasionally and about two-thirds of you use the internet for banking and/or bill-paying.

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

86% of teachers have desktop computers available in their classrooms; 67% of teachers have access to laptops for their students if they need them; and only 5% of teachers have no access to computers of any kind.

9% of teachers spend more than 50% of instructional time using technology, while 16% of report no use of technology during classroom time.

85% of teachers report not having enough computers in their classroom as a barrier to using digital content, either always (23%) or sometimes (63%).

Nearly 95% of teachers use technology to search for free content for use in their classrooms; 36% report that they do so at least three to four times a week.

17% of teachers participate in online social networking. Nineteen percent of teachers participate in an online professional community.

Students of all ages are creating multimedia presentations in school: 58% of high school students, 49% of middle school students, and 22% of elementary school students.

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This blog is authored and maintained by Thomas Boito.

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